The invention relates to a textile machine which is designed as a sewing machine in the form of a multineedle automatic stitching device, with a vertically movable needle holder above a needle plate, whose needles are supplied with upper threads unrolling from spools, and below the needle plate, shuttles arranged on horizontally movable shuttle holders, which contain spools with lower threads.
In the case of one such known textile machine, the shuttle with the lower thread always passes during sewing through a loop in the upper thread. Therefore, the spatial measurements for the shuttle and for the shuttle holder carrying it and moving back and forth are limited. It can occur in a multineedle automatic stitching device of this kind that in operation a single thread breaks, so that the corresponding seam cannot be executed, while the sewing workpiece continues to move through the machine and the subsequent seams are executed. In this case, a labor-intensive follow up work would be required, which is undesirable. There are, therefore, already known thread-monitoring devices for textile machines which effect an instantaneous switching off of the machine when only one single thread breaks. These known thread monitors work on the light source-photocell principle and can be installed where sufficient space is available. These known thread monitors are therefore installed, as an example, for monitoring the upper threads.